E-Commerce Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2015

It’s hard to believe we’re about to turn the page on yet another year but, nonetheless, here we are.

We figure there’s no better time to reflect on the developments in e-commerce that took place during the last 12 months while also looking forward to see what’s in store for 2015.

With that in mind, we examine four e-commerce trends that fired up our 2014 and will remain a tour de force next year:

In terms of growth, the sky is the limit.

As expected, the global B2C e-commerce market experienced significant growth this year—particularly on Cyber Monday. According to eMarketer, the industry as a whole grew by 20 percent in 2014, climbing to over $1.5 trillion. By 2017, that number is expected to jump to $2.35 trillion.

In 2015, we are confident we’ll see that growth continue, particularly as e-commerce merchants add more and more features to their online stores. In the United States, pundits expect that the e-commerce market will grow by 11 percent next year. So expect your website to have to accommodate even more traffic in 2015!

The m-commerce market will witness equally impressive growth.

According to Goldman Sachs, consumers across the globe will use their mobile devices to spend $204 billion in 2014. By 2018, that figure will more than triple to $626 billion.

To this end, e-commerce retailers will direct more of their focus to additional sales channels in 2015—and mobile in particular. Today’s consumers spend their days migrating among smartphones, tablets and laptops, and they’ve grown to expect a seamless experience as they shift from one device to the next.

As more consumers acquire mobile devices—and current owners become more comfortable shopping on theirs—forward-thinking business owners will need to put the technological infrastructure in place that ensures their customers have pleasurable m-commerce experiences.

Thanks to analytics, customer experiences will be increasingly personalized.

As even more consumers migrate their shopping to the digital world, businesses are going to be forced to focus on creating the best online customer experiences possible.

To do this, e-commerce retailers will do their best to personalize these experiences. That’s accomplished by leveraging customer-specific data and providing exclusive offers that are customized to a shopper’s personal preferences. And most importantly, leveraging an e-commerce database which can provide real-time analytics on their transactional system.

E-commerce vendors will be forced to update their databases.

With the numbers all indicating that consumers are more likely than ever to do their shopping online, e-commerce retailers will be forced to reassess the technology that powers their websites—after all, they need to make sure that their websites can handle the influx of traffic that’s likely to come their way—and when they do, they will likely be confronted with acknowledging the limitations of their own MySQL performance. While MySQL databases can handle small loads of traffic, as businesses grow, databases will eventually reach capacity. When that occurs, websites stop working properly, the customer experience is damaged, and your business will be hard-pressed to close a sale.

To counter this, decision makers will look for a scalable database solution that can grow with their business. That way, they will be in a prime position to accommodate any traffic that might come their way in 2015 and beyond.

In any event, for the world of e-commerce, the New Year is shaping up to be an exciting one, and we can’t wait to see what happens. From our team here at Clustrix to you and yours, have the happiest holidays. We’ll see you next year!